Hermes.

I haven't forgotten.

Hermes.

I would have rather been Orpheus,

travelling to various hells for you

and singing songs to save you,

as you could not save yourself:

stop looking back. The flames are not worth it.

Let my eyes burn brighter than the abyss.

Just whatever you do, do not turn your face

away Eurydice. Hades will have his Persephone

and you are not her.

It is better this way I guess. I would have looked

back at you and watched you crumble into

a shadowy pillar of salt as did the wife of Lot

when she looked back at Sodom. I am faithless,

which is why I cannot sing like Orpheus. I am faithless,

which is why I would have watched you melt into

a shadowy memory of the underworld even if I could.

Instead, I was a messenger of these strange myths.

Wings on my feet, I raced against the multitudinous

skylines of the worlds I do not inhabit, skipped across

volumes and volumes of rows and columns of planets and

stars written by dead old men and women. They spoke presently

of the voluminous presence their absence had created, and did so

without having known of the secrets of this absence when

they wrote about their respective presents. Presents conferred

to wishful wing-footed thinkers who then spiral uncontrollably with their mouths

to sudden and dangerous depths: Every serious reader remembers

the first time they stopped whispering controversies and started shouting them

without knowing that they were shouting them: Ideas are messy things

that don't need loudspeakers: Decibels violently shudder themselves out

of being the moment you mention to your mother that God

might not exist and Camus said so: Existence itself implodes outwards

like how plants produce seeds that make themselves when novels

start at their ends which are really their beginnings: Children

kill their mothers through birth: Boys with wings on their feet

This is

          how

and

          where

I flew towards you without a chariot

and found you in your various hells, one book at a time,

and why I would have rather have been Orpheus

because at least then I could have sang you songs

before you ended up retreating back into your various

selves. It could have been my fault then for looking back.

It could have been,

   could have been,

   could have been

you that was Orpheus. You who looked back.

You being the reason that I crumbled into a pillar of

shadow and salt because, as did Lot's wife, I looked back.

We both did, and watched the whole world invert itself

on its axis, then turn and twist and shift itself

into superimposed images and shapes and dreams

that changed you from muse to poet and

dream to dreamer

and Eurydice to Orpheus

and to Lot then his wife

and to this: which you always were.

              Those wings on your feet: When

the librarians changed the positions of the bookshelves-

and therefore our imaginations: our movements

and stanzas and scenes and days and nights-

               Those wings on your feet: When

that happened they must have stopped fluttering

for a second. I tried flying again and fell.

I haven't been much of a messenger since.

The Flying Mercury by Giovanni da Bologna
Image Source: http://acircleofquiet.typepad.com/.a/6a0105365c8671970c010536d7ed61970c-320wi